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“BTW, I want to let you know I’m Poz, if that’s OK with you.”

This is the all too often tidbit of knowledge I get from guys on the web, particularly here in SoFlo, a hotbed for AIDS with some of the highest stats in the country, when we’re down to negotiating when and where. Unlike some negative men, I’m cool with playing with a poz guy if he’s otherwise healthy and looks like his pics. But, fellows, being HIV positive and having full blown AIDS are two different universes.

Some one coughs on me in the supermarket and I become cold – positive. But I remain that unless my immune system doesn’t kick in and I come down with a full blown cold. Same shit with HIV. You can be HIV positive but asymptomatic, you get treated, yada, yada, yada… But ten years later, often the incubation period between being exposed and becoming ill, or if the treatments no longer work, and you come down with symptoms – weight loss, shitting your brains out, liver failure, dementia, etc., well, buddy, you ain’t “poz” anymore. You got AIDS.

The problem is these guys run pics in their profiles when they still had their shit together and then show up at your door looking like they were just released from Auschwitz. You aren’t the guy you purported to be – period – and are hoping for a pity fuck. (Ya hear me, Gary, who stood me up three times in a row?)

I also believe there are guys out there who create a persona on the web that no longer exists because the handsome man they once were simply no longer exists. They’re the ones who will come on to you big time but are never willing to commit to a face-to face – always the excuses – because they know it can never happen.